Sarah gave me my xmas present early. Actually she would have given it to me a day earlier except stupid Amazon didn’t deliver it on time. Anyway, she got me the Lord of the Rings Return of the King (LOTRROTK) extended remix collector’s DVD gift set. It came with five discs. Two of the discs are the extended remix of the movie, which is 4 hours and 10 minutes long. Then two more discs are all the really cool behind the scenes extras and stuff. And then the 5th disc is Howard Shore, Creating The Lord of the Rings Symphony, A Composer’s Journey Through Middle-earth. I know what you’re thinking, “Uhh… ok, wtf?” Yea, I don’t know either, but I’ll watch it and see how it is. Aside from the movie being cool, it also came with this highly detailed statue thing of Minas Tirith. For the nerd in all of us (or maybe just me), the photo below points to a small gallery I made showing off my Minas Tirith.

Another cool thing about this is that the statue separates from the base to reveal a neat little keepsake area.

I’ve added a lot of the older photos to the gallery. Most of these are nothing new and you’ve probably seen them before if you ever visted Sarah’s old site. They’re all awaiting Sarah’s witty captions and half of them need to be rotated so give it some time.

Last night we went into the city to have dinner and drinks with some of Sarah’s former coworkers who were in town for some big semiconductor thing. We had dinner at The Stinking Rose which has the slogan, “We season our garlic with food.” The food was over priced but it was ok. After that we walked a few blocks to Enrico’s Sidewalk Cafe. It had a pretty cool bar and some liquor company representatives were there pushing their particular brand of gin by offering free drinks and stupid little credit card holders. We stayed there for a while until we had to leave in order to catch the 10 o’clock train back to Menlo Park.
I had met Dan and Brielle before at Jeff’s party and of course Sarah had known them for a while. It was good to see some familiar faces and I know Sarah had great time “shop talking” even though she doesn’t work there anymore.

Anyway, there’s only a few, but the pictures are here.

After sitting on hold for 30 minutes I finally found out today that my car is somewhere in Arizona and there was no hope of me getting it today. So with that news, Sarah and I decided to take yet another road trip to Monterey and Carmel. Monterey was cute and fairly pretty but it seemed extremely touristy. I don’t have a problem with tourist stuff, since that’s what I’ve been for the past few weeks, but if it goes too far it just takes away from the natural attractiveness of a place. Carmel was absolutely beautiful though. Though I haven’t seen many, the beach we went to was the prettiest I’ve ever seen. Plus I got to take a picture of a beached jellyfish.

The pictures from today are here.

By the way, Sarah and I took a little road trip last Tuesday to Big Basin Redwoods State Park. We both really wanted to see some redwoods but didn’t feel like driving the 4 hours to the one with the avenue of giants and stuff. Turns out Big Basin was pretty cool and really pretty. The pictures are here.

We went and did a 1.7 mile hike on a trail that was supposed to lead to some waterfalls but it turned out once we got there it was just a really lame drip into a sad little pool. But that was ok, the hike itself was fun.

The Move

For those who are interested, this is a log of the move to California, as much of it as I can remember and about as organized as a pile of gravel.

Pictures we took along the way are here. Sarah was nice enough to take the time and add all the descriptions for the photos.

Monday June 28th.
After completing all the packing and cleaning of the old place, we headed over to Mike’s just before midnight. Meaning to get up and leave early in the morning, I naturally stayed up past 4 am talking to Mike.

Click to read more …